Webicy Blog

The 2009 BlogCamp will be held on 17th January at Microsoft, Mumbai.

An annual event, BlogCamp Mumbai is a place where you meet fellow bloggers, discuss ideas and meet interesting people.

Event Details:

Date: 17th January (Saturday)

Time: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm

Address: Microsoft Corporation (I) Pvt. Ltd. 4th Floor, Windsor Building, Off CST Road, Kalina, Santacruz (East) Mumbai – 400 098

You can attend this event by registering for it here.

Update:

• Registrations have been closed.

• Event to begin in a while ~ 10:45AM
• 11:15AM – Session on Blogs with a heart: Virtual Helplines in times of crisis by Harish Iyer.

Follow me on Twitter for updates: k3n13

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Interoute, the internet networks company, reports that three of the four internet sub-cables that run from Asia to North America have been damaged.

These carry more than 75 per cent of traffic between the Middle East, Europe and America.

Egypt’s communications ministry says Internet cables in the Mediterranean Sea have been cut, causing massive Internet outages.

Undersea cables were also damaged in January, causing outages in the Mideast and India.

Yemen and Sudan were also having phone and Internet difficulties Friday, but it was unclear if it was connected to the outage.

Packet loss for each country can be checked at: http://www.internettrafficreport.com/asia.htm

Sources:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/technology/2008/12/is-the-internet.html?%3F
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gmea01PjMKwYuU8amN4_n7W0ycEgD955S40G4

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I’m seeing a new feature today ‘Promote and Remove button’ next to Google search results. Note: These buttons only appear when you are logged in and only affect the results that you see.

Log in to your account, promote a page and up it comes, then logout and you will see it drop back. Login again and there it is back at the top.

Here’s how it looks:

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Google dropped out of the top 20 of an annual survey ranking of companies most trusted on privacy by consumers.

Some of the companines in the top 20 were:

American Express
eBay Inc.
Apple Inc.
Yahoo Inc.
Facebook Inc.
IBM Corp.
Hewlett-Packard Co.
Intuit Corp.

Source: bizjournals.com

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Google has set up a countdown page where you can see how many days, hours, minutes and seconds are left for New Year. Find out each day how to count down the holidays with Google. The calendar also presents a new item each day for users. Yesterday was “Get gift ideas and holiday savings”, and the calender contained a link to top searches on Google Product Search. Create, collaborate, and celebrate with Google Docs & Countdown to 2009.

Google Countdown 2009

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Web giants Facebook and Google unveil new features to promote the social web. A services that let users take their existing log-ins and deploy them across a number of sites.

Google’s Friend Connect, out now in beta, is pitched at webmasters who want to add social networking tools to their web sites. The search giant said in a blog posting that this is as simple as “cutting and pasting a bit of code”, and requires no advanced coding or technical ability.

“The goal is to facilitate an open social web,” said Google product manager Mussie Shore in the blog post. “Using open standards like OpenID and OAuth, Friend Connect makes it simple for people to instantly interact with one another on the sites that they already love to visit.

Facebook Connect, meanwhile, which was announced this Summer, has also been updated, according to a blog posting on its web site. However, as might be expected with a social networking site, Facebook is asking its users to create momentum.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook will add sites to the service where there is user demand, and asked subscribers to get in contact with the firms in question to request a connection.

Source: vnunet.com

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The much talked about Yahoo – Google Deal has finally collapsed. Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s chief executive says he felt let down by Google’s decision to pull out of a advertising agreement between the two internet rivals.

Yahoo’s lack of growth is the main reason behind all this. By next year, the company will have been through four consecutive years with virtually no increase in its cashflow, estimated Mark Mahaney, internet analyst at Citigroup. That is in spite of having one of the biggest global online audiences at a time when advertisers are making a historic shift to the internet, and is a clear sign that it needs to find a new strategic direction, he added.

The $800m deal – which would have enabled Google to sell advertising on some parts of Yahoo’s search engine listings – had been subject to a formal investigation by the US Department of Justice over potential antitrust concerns.

With Yahoo’s other options seemingly closed off, it is little surprise that all eyes yesterday turned back to Microsoft. But talking to an audience of internet entrepreneurs and investors, Yang said the collapse of takeover talks was “not personal” and that he harboured no ill will towards Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.

“People who know me will know that I don’t have an ego about remaining independent,” he said. “I have a lot of respect for Steve and we’d had a lot of good conversations. From my perspective, it’s not personal.”

Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology…6/yahoo-google
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/86e31826-a…077b07658.html

http://forums.webicy.com/showthread.php?t=7468

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Google has announced that its spiders will now begin including scanned documents in its search results. In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results. Google said they are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that they find stored in Adobe’s PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets them convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found.

In the past Google has indexed documents saved as PDF’s but scanned documents are a lot more difficult for a computer to read. From now on Google searches will include the text within these scanned images in normal search results. When you encounter a scanned document you’ll be able to view it in its original form as a PDF, or as a converted text file (click “View As HTML”).

To see the new system at work, click on search queries below. Note the document excerpt in the search results, along with the full text presented after the ‘View as HTML’ link:

[repairing aluminum wiring]
[spin lock performance]
[Mumps and Severe Neutropenia]
[Steady success in a volatile world]

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David L. Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, keeps tabs on more than 45 million weblogs. So you’d imagine he probably knows what makes a good blog:

1) React quickly. Commentators like Andrew Sullivan and Michelle Malkin draw megatraffic with immediate rebuttals to A-list pundits at The New York Times and Fox News.

2) Make your posts easy to read. Italian comic Beppe Grillo broke into the Top 10 by setting his key points in boldface.

3) Link, link, link! It’s counter-intuitive, but the busiest blogs in Technorati’s index are those like Insta-Pundit.com that link prolifically to other sites. Linking works because most bloggers reciprocate by sending their readers your way.

4) Optimize for search engines. Put the name of your blog (even if it’s just your own name) in the main URL and the title tag of your site. On Technorati, identify your blog with search topics, like “politics” or “sewing.”

5) Post, post, post! Chinese actress and director Xu Jinglei has the most popular blog on the planet. At first we thought it was a glitch in our system, but it turns out she’s a real-world celebrity who makes time to post almost every day. What’s your excuse?

Source: liambyrnes.co.uk

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Google can be your phone book.
Type a person’s name, city, and state directly into the search box, and Google will deliver phone and address listings at the top of the results. The feature works for business listings too.

Google can be your calculator.
Type a math problem into the search box and Google will compute it. You can spell out the equation in words (two plus two, twelve divided by three), use numbers and symbols (2+2, 12/3), or type in a combination of both (ten million) *pi, 15% of six).

Longer is better, but shorter is ok.
Google is designed to return high-quality results even for one- or two-word queries, so you can keep your searches short. But adding a few more words often yields better results.

Use quotation marks when precision matters.
Typing “the search is over” into Google will return web pages about the rock song by Survivor – but leaving off the quotes will produce an assortment of unrelated pages. The reason: adding quote marks phrase as it was typed. That makes quote marks especially helpful when searching for song lyrics, people’s names, or expressions such as “to be or not to be” that include very common words. Read the rest of this entry »

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